AI Research & Frontier Labs · August 2026
Asked why a company building retinal implants would look at oncology, Hodak reframes the entire body as life support. The brain is the one organ that cannot be transplanted even in principle; the heart, liver and lungs are, in his phrase, support characters. The joke is the argument.
Transcript
Yeah, so AMD, it's like one in two have some early stage by 80. It's like one in 10, 85 that I actually have it. It is definitely a major issue, and not just vision, but these topics in general affect everybody. We don't have firm pricing yet. This is a thing that we are being a little cautious about how we talk about publicly because we aren't totally sure yet. But the precedents for vision are all, I mean, I think we could say they're expensive. I mean, Second Sight 10 years ago, they so there's a company about a decade ago that had a retinal prosthesis that works differently than ours does. It did not get the type of performance that Prima does, but was briefly approved because, again, there's really nothing for these patients. There's always been a lot of enthusiasm for anything that could possibly help them. And they didn't get what we call form vision. They didn't get like a coherent face or like paragraph that your eyes could scan over. They got these flashes of light that patients could look at and kind of think about assembling into what they meant. They got paid about $150,000 per patient in the mid-2010s. There's a gene therapy that works that is only relevant in the first place for about 5% of patients in one narrow indication. And it really doesn't work that well. It gets 0.1 lines of improvement. It kind of slows the rate of degeneration for some patients. That reimburses at almost half a million dollars per eye. And so there's, I mean, some of this is a function of just how expensive it is to develop these therapies and how high the failure rate has been historically. And then some of it is that there's just, it is, I mean, vision is a very dominant sense for us. If you lose that, that's totally debilitating and restoring it is very important, even just like minimal vision. So the. The TAM will grow over time. For this first version, it's on the scale of like hundreds of thousands of patients in the U.S. and Europe. So, for the current version of Freema, it's probably hundreds of thousands of patients. And then the next version, which is going into animal studies now, will be in humans hopefully next year, should expand that to millions.
You said something that surprised me as an intermediate point between vision and fully understanding consciousness. How does oncology or other, like, how do other indications fit into the picture in terms of what you might work on?
I mean, the thing that makes you the only organ that you can't even, in principle, transplant is the brain. The heart, the pancreas, the liver, the lungs, as far as I'm concerned, they're really support characters. They're there to keep the brain activity interesting and going. And I think we're going to get to a point where, because the biology is so difficult, I mean, you've got this like alien nanotechnology that is around us that we are like completely surrounding us that we are completely dependent on that we understand still very poorly. Instead of needing to solve that, are there ways where we can accomplish the same fundamental goals, you know, like using a toolbox that humanity is much more advanced in? And so, I'm going to be ultimately fairly disappointed if I'm murdered by my pancreas. And that I think that's that's the worldview. It's that the thing that matters is the brain. The brain is the computer that gives us this. You could not, we talk about being a brain in a vat or having like these upload thought experiments, but you already that's what the skull is. Like the brain is connected to the environment through a small number of wires, the cranial and spinal nerves. The optic nerve is nerve two, the vestibular cochlear nerve that carries hearing imbalance is nerve eight. You've got these little cables that carry your interaction with the world. That world is generated by the brain. And so, if you can get visual, the visual signal, auditory signal, balance motor, like somatosensory motor in and out of the brain, that is an end in itself. That is the central object. And through a mix of the BCIs that allow you to kind of change the thing that it's interacting with, and our perfusion medicine program, we think that there's ways to significantly improve not just lifespan, but health span and kind of create a better, better quality of life for many patients in ways that I think will feel kind of like a lateral move rather than just solving many of the things that people have seen on the horizon.
For people who are interested in working at or investing in science, if you are successful, you know, what will be the change the human experience 20 years from now, besides you not worrying about your pancreas as much?
Yeah, I mean, that's it. Like, that's the, there's the, there's a sense, like a fragility that we all live, like there's this jeopardy that we all live under as part of the human condition. And I think that if we're successful, what will happen is that sense of jeopardy will fade. Like we will be, we will just become much less fragile. We will have the ability to upgrade and replace parts of ourselves. So, neurodegeneration, we don't know about that. One still seems, that's still difficult. That still needs like real investment. The two leading causes of death, though, are cardiovascular disease and cancer not metastasized to the brain. And I think both of those are going to be really attackable through this type of work. The other extreme is if we're serious about exploring the universe and going to the stars, we are going to have to adapt ourselves to that environment. We're not going to export Earth with us everywhere we go. And these bodies are great, but they're designed for this planet. And it is going to be adapting ourselves to the hard vacuum space is definitely going to be, I think, the thing that we want to do in the long run. And ultimately, those are the same project.
Being able to preserve yourself and being able to adapt yourself. Swappable parts and substrate
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